Folk & Traditional / All styles

Raag Chandrakauns in a recording from a private concert in Stockholm 1969 with two of the real giants of Hindustani music, Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar on rudra veena (been) and Pandit Taranath on pakhawaj. In the spring of 1969 Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and Pandit Taranath Rama Rao were returning from their first teaching trip to U.S. Z. M. Dagar had been at Wesleyan and Taranathji at Ravi Shankar’s school in L.A. if I remember right. Since I was learning from Taranathji and had stayed in t…

This recording from the Puniyatithi (memorial concert) for Ustad Shamsuddin Khan in 1968 is going to be one of the finest authentic and rare tabla jugalbandis (duets) you will ever hear. Shashi & Ravi were the first to introduce tabla Jugalbandi and Sawal Jawab (question and answer between the two artists). from a very young age in the early 1940’s they became two of the most sought after players of their time. Apart from being a celebration of their great grand guru, the occasion was fur…

The great singer/saint Swamy Haridhos and his followers in a long concert of religious singing from New Years Day 1968. Music and devotion in equal parts. The last tracks will be found on digital-only album CEX14. Not only was Swamy Haridhos an extremely charismatic leader, preacher and singer, head and shoulders taller than ordinary bhajan singers, but as such he attracted the participation of top notch accompanists. In this recording from Gita Govinda Hall in Bombay you hear him with his…

The legendary tabla maestro and teacher, Pandit Taranath leads his two young star students Sadanand Naimpalli and Mohan Balvally in a 45 minutes tabla duet in front of a wildly entusiastic audience at The Trinity Club in Bombay 1967. Pandit Taranath is not represented on record before. Tabla: Sadanand Naimpalli Tabla: Mohan Balvally Harmonium/recitation: Pandit Taranath

2015 Reissue. With the oddly evocative choice of his third solo album’s title, appropriated from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 surrealist-pastoral novel Trout Fishing in America, Mike Cooper might very well have been describing his own mercurial musical practice. “Trout Steel” suggests a reflective, highly mutable, quicksilver riverine element, an apt metaphor for the lap steel runs summoned from his trademark National resophonic guitars and his restless, constantly evolving development as a singer, …

2016 repress. Recordings from 1978 by David Toop of Yanomami ritual songs, shamanistic ceremonies, and rainforest sounds. The voices of spirits and animal familiars, ventriloquial illusions of sound in dark spaces, secret spirit languages, the clap of thunder that links shamanic trance with the sleep language of Finnegans Wake... Out of these passages of the everyday, intensity flares like flames caught by a gust of wind. Skin burns or oozes blood, the wind blows up havoc as the spirits m…

2013 release. With his sight set on legendary figures of guitar experimentation (John Fahey, Jim O’Rourke, Loren Connors), Negro builds a statement of his own that is wider than it may seem at first hearing: ambient, mutant blues, field recordings, finger picking, rusty folk, post-punk, lo-fi poetry…

Reissued by Fledg'ling in 2005, and originally released in 1967, Watch The Stars is a remarkable long-lost gem from the mid-'60s British folk revival. A beautiful collection of folk, blues and haikus, the album melds a folk-boom topicality with a fine "beat" sensibility; uniting the Afro-American West Coast with suburban London. Long out-of-print, the record is an early milestone in the careers of Dorris Henderson and John Renbourn. OnWatch The Stars, Dorris and John are joined by the classical …

  2008 release, restocked. "Fotheringay remain one of the great might-have-beens of British music. They lasted less than a year, and released just one album, but their disappearance robbed the early-'70s scene of a group of musicians capable of taking folk-rock to new heights of subtlety and musicianship. Now, the nine songs on that debut album; assumed for almost four decades to be their sole testament, are joined by the eleven that would have constituted a follow-up. Sadly the group broke up d…

Ben Chasny was on a holy roll when he laid down the eleven tracks on Dust and Chimes. It was 1998 and y'all were floating on that Bill Clinton peace-and-prosperity bubble. Meanwhile, Chasny had dropped his self-titled debut LP earlier that year, and the cognoscenti and illuminati were pricking up their ears. Dust and Chimes announced the arrival of a brow-furrowed troubadour whose complex, morosely beautiful guitar playing didn't Basho you over the head with Fahey-isms. The three solo guitar tra…

Rob Jacobs, known in the DIY scene for his group Wei Zhongle, released his S/T solo album on February 10th through Chicago progressive label, International Anthem.Jacobs’ eponymous album flirts with Eastern folk, psychedelia, avant-garde, and lyrics that “surface out of the waters of the subconscious.” Just as surprisingly, it even evokes Western pop music. ‘Wordless Incantation’ wryly introduces listeners to the album. Listeners may not know what to expect, and the song only leads them deeper i…

Ilyas Ahmed's songs exist in a sublime moment of suspended animation, calmly dwelling in between modes of music making both timeless and contemporary – deeply imbued with stillness and peace. On I Am All Your Own, his first album in three years, Ahmed employs strategies gleaned from experimental and ambient musicians, such as Lawrence English and Fripp & Eno, and applies them to song-based guitar music. Building slowly and purposefully, each individual track adds to the album's overall, scrupulo…

"La casa del lago" came out just a year after Saint Just's eponymous debut album; in 1973 the band were a very special trio, consisting of Jenny Sorrenti (voice), Antonio Verde (guitar) and Robert Fix (saxophone). They had a contract with Harvest (as well as Jenny's brother Alan Sorrenti, who debuted with "Aria" the previous year), and managed to stand out in the vast Italian pop scene of the early '70s.Unlike many other musical realities, they had a concrete support from the record label…

A widescreen, cinematic vision for acoustic guitar composition from this classically trained Icelandic artist, Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir. From minimal tone poems to densely melodic ballads, VDSQ Solo Acoustic Volume 14 presents a deeply personal approach to modern guitar that takes us on a journey of unexpected beauty. guitarist, violist and improviser, in recent years based in and around LA, California and in Iceland, where she received her education in viola performance and experimental co…

Chang Fo Ji are small, plastic, battery-powered soundboxes, available throughout China and Tibet, that play a variety of Buddhist loops, from poppy modern Chinese Buddhist prayers to ancient recordings of famous Tibetan Buddhist masters. They can be taken everywhere, offering the listener portable immersion into the hypnotizing, minimalist world of Buddhist prayers. Both sides of this record contain various loops from various Chang Fo Ji gathered in China by Laurent Jeanneau (Kink Gong) be…

Originally released in 1972 on Vanguard Records, Bob Frank’s self titled debut album took elements of Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Ian Tyson and filtered it through a pot-smoked haze infused with Frank’s long-time friend, Memphis guru Jim Dickinson. Dickinson and Frank shared a mutual admiration that ran so deep that on Dickinson’s own 1972 debut album Dixie Fried (released on Atlantic Records) he recorded one of Bob’s songs, ‘Wild Bill Jones.’ Despite the Dickinson/Memphis connection, Bob Frank’s on…

FAT and the Masters of Haha is a 73-minute release of FAT's recording with the southern Moroccan Berber group Aouad Mia, master rebab player Rais Lahcen Benlamouden, and other Berber singers and percussionists. It was recorded in Agadir, Morocco, in 1991 after development during FAT's numerous visits to Morocco over the previous three years. Aouad Mia's music is improvised but extremely tight and crisp, and combined with FAT, the music ranges from ferocious looped attacks through complex me…

LP, 300 copies. Silkscreened thick folder covers with stamped labels. The long awaited traditional monument is finaly available on record! Tornarem Dançar, recorded in 2004, stands alone among musicians as the best Auvergne/Limousin traditional album ever recorded in the last decades. We had originaly proposed to produce a second record of the duo and open our vinyl catalogue back in 2009, thus these new sessions have never been recorded and might never will. After many years of open discussion …

Excellent 1976 private press acoustic album, self-recorded at various places in Colorado, and filled with beautiful fingerstyle acoustic guitar, plus some atonal bottleneck slide, string scrapes and drones (at times, very Ry Cooder/Paris, Texas about six years before that soundtrack existed). Although almost completely instrumental, what lyrics there are tend towards the dark and the satiric. The obvious points of comparison are John Fahey and Leo Kottke, although Scott Key certainly has h…

"Alasdair Roberts is the name of the new solo record from the well-known Scottish songwriter, guitarist and singer Alasdair Roberts -- his eighth Drag City Records release under that name... Alasdair Roberts' ten songs are sparse, intimate and concise. The focus throughout is on Alasdair's deft acoustic fingerstyle guitar and his voice. The songs are variously elliptical and gnomic, direct and personal, romantic and tender. There are occasional guest appearances from fellow Glasgow-dwellers Alex…

First new studio recordings from Pelt in 3 years finds them picking up where 2005's Untitled CD left off - delivering massive slabs of heavy, all-acoustic drone action. "Waning Crescent" is an ominous workout for three large gongs, rich with overtones and subsonic rumble. "Fire Signs Along the Field" offers a slightly jarring quartet of spare string noise, with Nathan Bowles (Black Twigs, Spiral Joy Band) sitting in on double bass. "Cast Out to Deep Waters" is an immense 30 minute epic that fits…

The Travelling Archive is a journey through the folk music of Bengal. It is run by Calcutta-based Bengali singer, writer and researcher, Moushumi Bhowmik, and sound recordist and sound designer, Sukanta Majumdar. They have been making field recordings of songs and stories across Bangladesh and eastern India, even the Bengali diaspora in East London, since 2003; documenting and disseminating their research through archives, presentation-performances, art works, and their own independent reco…

2009 Release "VDSQ (Vin Du Select Qualitite) is an acoustic guitar LP series curated by Steve Lowenthal of Swingset Magazine and Plastic Records. The series is released on high quality LP with letterpress sleeves, each with a picture of the guitar used to record the record. Track-by-track notes included on the back cover. 'The idea behind VDSQ was really to do a label that was a nod to the great guitar-oriented labels like Takoma and Transatlantic but focusing on contemporary artists rather than…

Robbie Basho's Zarthus, dating from 1974, is, in his own words, "An album of Persian, Arabic, Westerns Themes (sic), woven together into a single 'Fabric D'Amour' to cover the barren manekin (sic) of modern times." Easily the album that most indulges his obsessions with Eastern modal scales and odd meters, and even Western classical themes. All of it is grounded in Basho's guitar though, and the discs first two tracks, "Zarthus" (dedicated to Meher Baba, Pete Townshend's guru) and "The Lord Of T…

Peter Walker is an American original, as eclectic and enigmatic as the songs he writes. The legendary seventy-five year old raga/psychedelic/folk acoustic guitarist, who was schooled by masters such as Ravi Shankar, and Ali Akbar Khan, has been described by Larry Coryell as, “One of the most original practitioners of contemporary music” and proclaimed by the Beatles’ press agent Derek Taylor as “Perhaps the greatest guitarist in the world.” His music, celebrated by the late Jack Rose, James Blac…

The voices are two, spinning harmonies both heavenly and salt-pickled. Picking their direction and floating along on a pair of acoustics, New Bums are the sound of old drunk America, dancing out of the shadows, coming forth again to stand in the light, in the hopes of repopulating those sad old single-occupancy hotels before they're all torn down. New Bums is the grudging match-up of Donovan Quinn (Skygreen Leopards) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Comets on Fire, 200 Years, Rangda and…

With the resurgence of interest in folk music it's hardly surprising to see countless compilations showing up week after week, but compilations this moving and this important are rarely chanced upon. This disc puts together the lesser heard folk tracks, songs recorded by artists who weren't sponsored by major label money, artists who simply made music because they were desperate to make music, artists free from poisonous delusions of grandeur. You will likely not have come across one of the four…

Laurent Jeanneau and Shi Tanding have returned from the northwest corner of China's Xinjiang province with an amazing batch of recordings collected during the weeks leading up to the volatile Uyghur uprising of 2009. Armed with their trusty audio gear, the couple was set on getting married and recording various styles of regional ethnic music near the Chinese border with Kazakhstan. However, the local authorities suspected that the pair had other intentions, shadowing and interrogating them wher…

This is an extract of the first part of Daniel Higgs' two-hour concert at Booze Cooperativa in Athens, November 8th 2009. Higgs performed that piece accompanying his unique singing style with a shruti-box and managed to hypnotize the greek audience, sharing with them the psychedelic world of his lyrics. An evening for everybody that was present to remember. Cover artwork designed by the award winning graphic-design duo "bend", who won that same year a grand prize for their work over Daniel Higgs…

“The Electric Dragon of Venus” is the first full length record since Clinical Shyness, in the meantime a track from MDK was published on a 7” split with Rella the Woodcutter and other five old tracks appeared on the split cd series “5 Pezzi Facili” under the “Cynical Quietness EP” name.The new album has been recorded with the aid of ONQ and also features the appearance of other guest musicians, Piergiorgio Storti (Morose), Stella Riva (Satan is My Brother), Matteo Uggeri (Sparkle in Grey)…

"Of the players involved in the recent resurgence of fingerstyle guitar, Harris Newman has established himself as a primary envoy on the modern day steel-stringer shortlist. As with the case of his brothers-in-arms Jack Rose, Glenn Jones and Steffen Basho-Junghans, each of whom borrow from the past traditions of mavericks Fahey, Basho et al but have re-invented the sound and style with fresh perspectives, Newman distinguishes his music even further with a very idiosyncratic sound. In cont…

L'Orchestre Kanaga De Mopti is one of the best West African modern orchestras which originated from a wide range of state funding. In 1977, the Malian government-owned label Mali Kunkan released a series of LPs including this Holy Grail of Malian music, now fully remastered and available again via an official reissue! In the 1960s, during the First Republic of Mali, modern orchestras were encouraged and promoted by Modibo Keita's government. Starting in 1960, Bani Jazz became the city and …

Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow was written and recorded as a follow-up to the Bill Fay Group's Time Of The Last Persecution. Although recorded between 1978 and 1981 this album never saw a release at the time, and it fell to the Durtro/Jnana label to unearth these lost 20 songs. Fay comes across as one of those artists who fell victim to the machinations of the music industry, with his first two albums going largely overlooked until an eventual resurgence in interest as the years passed. …

John Fahey’s first album, released in 1959 for the record label he co-founded, is a beautiful introduction to this incredible artist. Blind Joe Death remains a wonderful album and displays Fahey’s ability to re-interpret the blues and folk idioms prevalent at the time in his own inimitable style. The album's mystique probably owes more to the 1959 record's rarity (and utter oddity in the context of its era) than the music, in which Fahey's experimental blues-folk acoustic fusion is just be…

Formed in Baltimore, MD in the early 70s, The Entourage Music And Theatre Ensemble played a kind of experimental, ambient, new age, proto-world music, made to accompany multi-media performance art pieces. This is the first of two albums they released on Folkways, reissued lovingly on vinyl in an exact replica of the original jacket and booklet. Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble uses saxophone, keyboards, percussion, viola, recorder, guitar, drums and thumb piano to explore an"experimental-spi…

Last copies, special offer...Our very first one sided LP is a bizarre trip from Michael Curtis Hilde's Mountainhood project. This one follows on from the two LPs on Time Lag's Red Records label a few months back which vanished super fast, as well as other releases on Reverb Worships and Yod. Total outsider midnight missions into weirdness... strange strings twang and rattle into the darkness, a very strange experience spread across one side of black wax.

Gatefold double LP version with download of the entire album - Bill Fay is one of English music's best kept secrets. At the dawn of the 1970s, he was a one-man song factory, with a piano that spilled liquid gold and a voice every bit the equal of Ray Davies, John Lennon, early Bowie, or Procol Harum's Gary Brooker. He made two solo albums but his contract wasn't renewed, which left his LPs and his reputation to become cult items. But he never stopped writing, the music kept on coming. Now,…

Another amazing Mississippi reissue. Old style tip-on jacket with extensive liner notes and bonus 7"** " In 1978 Jack Body recorded an amazing amount of street musicians in java. His ear was geared not just towards traditional folk forms of music but also to all the new hybrids of pop street music. Here we find a mix of his recordings that really cannot by classified easily. Influences on the music include Bollywood soundtracks, American rock & pop, Javanese traditional songs & modern gam…